Thursday, February 17, 2011

Dana Loesch Invents Bizarre New Gladney Video Lie

Dana Loesch spoke on a panel about "new media" this past weekend at CPAC. Now the tea party story about the fight that occurred at an August town hall in 2009 has always been full of gaping holes and conspiracy theories, which is why they refuse to engage in an honest discussion about it. However, Loesch pulled out a completely new and bizarre claim about the incident during her speech. She claimed that the incident was caught on film by St. Louis tea party blogger Patch Adams, who just happened to be walking by with a flip camera. This is undeniably false.

To start, here are Loesch's comments (the relevant part goes until about the 2:48 minute mark):

Loesch claimed:

And nobody would know who Kenneth Gladney is, had it not been for a blogger whose name is Patch. And he runs a blog called P/Od Patriot. He just happened to be there with his flip cam, he's a tea party guy, he happened to see some stuff going down in the parking lot and he went there and he pressed the record button and he caught this guy Kenneth Gladney, he's a Luekemia survivor, I think I weigh more than Gladney does,getting kicked around and beat up in the parking lot. Nobody would have known had he not gotten it on video.

Patch Adams is indeed a local blogger who runs P/Od Patriot:Now I've met Patch a couple times, and he's a nice guy compared to other St. Louis tea party bloggers. However, he definitely was not the person who shot footage of the Gladney event. I could point to a lot of evidence such as the facts that it's not Patch's voice in the video, that the person who shot the video was clearly extremely tall, that it wasn't uploaded to Patch's youtube account, and that the person has been ID'd as someone else by witnesses at the event (see below). But all you really need to know is that Patch himself has said that he didn't take the video footage.

Patch wrote his own account about the town hall on his blog, and clearly stated that he was inside taping for Darin Morley of Reboot Congress, and did not shoot any of his own video or photos:

The only Arrests occurred at the end of the Town Hall Outside. As I understand it, a Black Conservative man was selling "Don't Tread on Me Flags" when 5 or 6 Union Thugs Jumped him and Beat Him. The Union Thugs were arrested and the Conservative man was sent to the Hospital and was only released this morning.

A Fellow Tea Party Militia Member was outside the Event and told me that there was alot of Tension and Shoving. He is currently Writing me an account of his experience which I will post later....

Unfortunately I did not Get any Video or Pictures, since I was Running Video For another Tea Party Blogger DSM.

Patch was definitely not the guy who taped the altercation.

Why does this matter? For one thing, this is a new form of dishonesty from Loesch. Normally she just takes figures or information wildly out of context, or simply bounces off the misinformation of some other conservative blogger. However, in this case, she just invented wholesale a tale about Patch Adams being outside the event with "a flipcam." Furthermore, she was telling this story to lie to a conservative audience.

But there's something that's much more interesting to me. I've always thought that it was incredibly interesting that this video, shot by a right-wing blogger, just happened to miss the entire beginning of the altercation and *only* catch the tail end where Perry Molens pulls Gladney backwards when Gladney is standing over McCowan. Is it possible that there's more video but that this one was just edited to start at this spot? Did the police even speak to the actual videographer?

As for the actual videographer, several witnesses have ID'd Craig Albrecht as the person who was doing the videotaping. Albrecht is a blogger at Missourah.com and his videos, including the Gladney video, are posted on the youtube account Moog Rogue. He also, by the way, does not generally use a "flip cam;" he actually has a hand held camcorder looking camera. It's not entirely clear why Loesch wouldn't just have mentioned Albrecht as the "grassroots citizen journalism hero:" maybe because he used to work for Goldman Sachs?

Anyway, I'm speculating about the motives, but one thing is certainly clear: Loesch completely invented a story out of thin air to lie to the CPAC audience.

3 comments:

i started watching this video yesterday but couldn't finish it. I don't know why Dana is so fixated on the Gladney scuffle. Had it been an actual hate crime like she claims, it would have actually been news. The only reason why anyone knows his name is because she won't quit talking about it. She is nuts.

I've been wondering about the videographer's identity too. It's very interesting that he has never come forward given all the hullabaloo about his video. Considering it's value as evidence, I wonder if he retained the other footage he shot because even if was focused on something else when the fight began, the audio would still be important. I also saw that video was done by someone who shared the views of the tea party based on the blog and the other youtube videos and it raised questions for as why does the video start when it does and what does the unedited footage look like?

I also find it very interesting when Gladney says to the cameraman, "You saw me" which hints that they that was not the first time they encountered each other.

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